FIRST PARLAMIENT: 11TH CENTURY CATALONIA

CLICK THIS LINK:

http://www.erepresentative.org/catalonian.htm

and this one:http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqzoldestparliament.htm

Which country had the world's first parliament?

Iceland's Althing parliament was created and first met in the year 930, making it the world's first legislative body or parliament.

FIRST PARLAMIENT: 11TH CENTURY CATALONIA

AFRICA:KENIA

AFRICA | 02.07.2010

Football changes girls' lives in rural Kenya

MTG is about football, but also about girls' lives

'We can do it' is the slogan of an organization in Kenya called Moving The Goalposts. It uses football to instill self-confidence in girls in Kenya and aims for nothing less than societal change.

The sound of girls playing football and clapping wildly when they score goals is not a sound often heard in rural Kenya. But here in the Kilifi district, north of the city of Mombasa, it has become fairly common. In this region, some 3,000 girls play football.

Today, on a dusty pitch in the village of Sokoke, 22 girls are playing in a training session, half in blue bibs, half in red ones. Many are barefoot. Despite the intense heat, the girls are constantly in motion.

But these girls are learning a lot more than just how to dribble, kick and score; they are learning how to think in new ways, ways that are unusual for young women in this part of the world.

Teaching self-confidence on the field and in life

"It is about a teenage girl realizing her goals in life, making her own decisions, including sexual decisions," Margaret Belewa, program manager of the Moving the Goalposts project, said.

"Most of the times, those decisions are made by the parents or by the husband. How can we help her so that she can take control of her life?"

Moving the Goalposts (MTG) aims to empower girls and young women in Kilifi, one of the poorest districts in Kenya, through football.

Remaking lives

Belewa grew up in this area, where life can be hard. Water is in short supply and many families don't have enough food. Children often have to travel long distances to get to school.

If the parents can afford the school fees for secondary education, it is mostly the girls who suffer as boys always come first. Only one in five girls get a secondary education.

Group instruction on the soccer pitch

MTG is trying to change this, and staff member Lydia Kasina is an example for the project's success. The self-confident, well-educated young woman would have had a very different life without MTG. She starting participating in the football project several years ago, now MTG is helping her go to college.

"If MTG was not here in Kilifi maybe I would be married with many children," says Kasina. "But now I am more informed, I am now supporting myself and my family."

Kasina now works for MTG, coordinating its health education program and teaching teenage girls about their bodies and sex, one of the project's main goals. Girls here often get pregnant while they are still in school and the levels of HIV infection are twice as high among this group than among boys of the same age.

Our bodies, ourselves

On a playground in Sokoke, over thirty girls are moving in a circle while they sing during a peer education session. The topic is menstruation.

The song talks about how a young girl can talk to her mother about her body, and trust her to keep it secret. In this group the girls can talk about these kinds of subjects openly and without being ashamed of what they don't know.

Besides learning about their bodies, the girls are also taught how to become future leaders - something which most of them have to learn from scratch. Women in rural Kenya rarely take on leadership roles; most mayors and national politicians are men. It is a challenge to change the girls' concepts of themselves in a world dominated by men.

The girls learn about their bodies

MTG's goal is nothing less than to change Kenyan society, which is why they chose the name they did.

"Everybody asks: Why Moving the Goalposts?" Belewa said. "But here we are talking about social goalposts. How do we move the girls, the teenage girls in Kilifi to a status like any other girl in the world?"

MTG is now widely recognized, far beyond Kilifi and Kenya. The organization was even invited to take part in the "Football For Hope project" organized by the world football association FIFA, to support development programs aimed at young people. More than 30 teams of players under the age of 18 from all over the world get the chance to travel to South Africa during the World Cup. MTG is one of them.

17-year-old Sarah is on that team, and she has plans for her future once she returns. She wants to finish her education, then she would like to become a famous broadcaster so that she can pass her knowledge to the people in Kenya. Because, she says, there are still many people who don't understand that women are equal to men.

Overcoming resistance

The MTG team know a lot needs to be done before women can be treated as equal partners in Kenyan society, but they're used to overcoming resistance. At first, Kasnia says, parents did not want their daughters playing football, worrying about their wearing shorts that exposed their thighs. But things have changed.

Working for change through football

"Like this year, I had a father who came with his daughter, he wants his daughter to join our organization so that she can be involved in all that activities we are doing," she said.

In the beginning, there were only 120 girls playing football in Kilifi. Now there are more than 3,000 girls and 27 league fields they play on. Yet Margaret Belewsa hopes to reach even more girls in the future, so the changes in society will be even bigger.

"We are just working in a small part of one corner now, but in time that contribution will be felt nationally because I can imagine of the girls we are working with from Kilifi could be a future leader," she said. "That is a moment everybody will celebrate."

Authors: Julia Kuckelkorn and Josephat Kioko (jam)
Editor: Ranjitha Balasubramanyam

LONDON'S NATIONAL GALLERY: COUNTERFEIT

ART | 13.07.2010

London's National Gallery exposes the art of counterfeit

This piece is painted on a panel that is dated after the alleged artist's death

A painting may look like that of an Old Master, but how do museums know the work is genuine? An exhibition in London reveals the experts' detective techniques - and some of the fakes they've been fooled by.

The first major exhibition of its kind, "Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries" gives visitors a unique, behind-the-scenes view of the work done by the London National Gallery's team of scientists, conservators and art historians.

Running through September 12, the free exhibition unveils some of the secrets of how to spot a forgery, displays some unexpected discoveries, and reveals how even the gallery's greatest art experts have been duped.

"We do research on the collection in a continuous way and we think the public may be interested in that research, to learn more about their own collection and to have some of the questions and issues exposed," said Ashok Roy, the National Gallery's director of scientific research. "We thought this was a good moment to look across the whole collection and bring out some of the more interesting case studies that we've looked at over the last 20 years."

The truth is in the details

The National Gallery's scientific department was founded in 1934 and has become a world leader in the study of materials and techniques of Western European paintings.

This forgery is a 20th-century remake of a Renaissance masterpiece

The first room of the exhibition is called "Deception and Deceit" and contains two fakes which are part of the National Gallery's collection, explained Roy, who has worked at the museum for 33 years and is also a curator of the exhibition.

One of the two counterfeit paintings has been identified as the work of an unknown early-20th-century forger. It's an ingenious fake which had the gallery's experts fooled until a combination of historical and scientific analyses revealed the truth.

"The picture was bought in the 1920's. In the 1960's a costume expert looked at the picture, there were already doubts," said Roy. "And they pointed out that the clothes worn by the group really were designs from 1910 so had nothing to do with Renaissance Italy. We've done a good deal of chemical analysis of the picture and that's told us there are materials which weren't available to painters in the 15th century - in fact, most of the pigments are 19th-century pigments."

Museum experts also discovered that the painting had an unusual varnish, made of a material called shellac which was used for furniture in the 19th century. With age, the material becomes yellowed and dark.

"What we think was done by the person who created this picture was to apply it to the paint so when it dried it began to shrink and that pulled the paint into a sort of cracking pattern which simulated age on the paint surface," explained Roy.

Science meets art

"Close Examination" isn't just about how the gallery can spot a fake, it also demonstrates how today's scientific methods can be used to reveal mistakes and make important discoveries. One of the paintings on display was originally bought as a work by the German artist, Hans Holbein, the Younger.

At that time, the National Gallery didn't own any works by Holbein and were particularly interested in acquiring one, which is why, speculated Roy, the authenticity of the work wasn't thoroughly examined. Using dendrochronology - a tree-ring dating technique - the museum experts were able to determine that the work, painted on an oak panel, was completed after Holbein's death in 1543.

In addition to tree-ring dating, Ashok Roy's department uses a variety of modern methods and tools illustrated and explained in the exhibition. They include pigment analysis, done on tiny samples using a scanning-electron microscope, infrared reflectography to detect carbon underdrawings, and ultraviolet and X-radiography which can reveal losses and changes to a painting.

Sometimes these techniques can turn up unexpected secrets hidden in the layers beneath the surface.

Dating the paint itself often gives the art experts clues to the real age of a painting

Aged paint difficult to imitate

With such advances in scientific analysis, deliberate forgery of the Old Masters is understandably on the decrease, but Roy said there are still people who can make pretty convincing fakes - on the surface, at least.

"What's very hard to do is to make them convincing under the surface, to use all the right materials and right techniques," he said. "And, in fact, it is impossible to age paint artificially so it ends up in its exact chemical composition as paint that has aged over 300 to 400 years."

"Close Examination" also offers visitors a confession to one of the gallery’s greatest misjudgements: Sandro Botticelli's "Venus and Mars" is displayed next to a similar work of the same era, originally also thought to be his. Purchased at the same auction, the gallery actually paid more for the inferior imitation than for the genuine Botticelli.

Author: Dany Mitzman (kjb)

Editor: Cyrus Farivar

SCIENCE: CREATING BIG BANGS

SCIENCE | 01.04.2010

Postcard from Europe: The big bang

This is what proton collision looks like

Scientists in Switzerland made history this week by creating thousands of mini big bangs. Critics fear the experiments could wipe out our world. Imogen Foulkes examines the theories in this Postcard from Europe.

Trying to understand what they're doing at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva isn't easy - especially for someone like me who struggled to pass physics at school. But go underground at CERN and it's clear that something pretty monumental is taking place.

An elevator plummets you down more than 100 meters. When the doors open, cavernous tunnels are revealed, in which enormous machines lurk. This is the cutting edge of particle physics. When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) finally gets up to full speed, it will, its fans claim, unlock the secrets of our universe.

To do this, the LHC this week began beaming particles through CERN's 27-kilometer tunnel, faster and faster, until these protons collide. The process is something that happened in the final seconds before the "big bang" which created our universe.

This collider should help unlock the secrets of our universe

"We're trying to understand what our universe is made of," says James Gillies, spokesman for CERN. How are we organized into atoms and molecules, into tables and chairs, into human beings, into galaxies?

"One thing we can't explain is why gravity is so weak, why you can jump up in the air even though a whole planet is pulling you down, but why the forces holding us together are so strong," Gillies says. "By observing what happens when the particles collide, we hope to be able to see how they really work."

Unpleasant side effects?

But this is an experiment that has never before been tried by mankind, and, not surprisingly, there are fears that there may be some unpleasant side effects.

There is a rumor that the magnetic force created by the collider will be so great that metallic objects - pots, pans, wrist watches together with their wearers - will be sucked to the ground and immobilized there for the duration of the experiment.

Then there's another more plausible suggestion, that you might not have much success using a compass in the Geneva region while the LHC is switched on.

The big vanishing act

But the tale which has been causing most worry, and even a number of court cases, is the one about black holes.

Some scientists have suggested that colliding protons will create black holes, which will eventually swallow the planet. Forget the big bang; this could be the big vanishing act.

Scientists at CERN admit they don't actually know whether black holes will be created or not. But they insist that particle collision happens in nature all the time, when cosmic rays hit our atmosphere. Any black holes created there are clearly harmless, so we needn't worry.

First results do seem to prove the doubters wrong. After a couple of days of particle collision, Geneva is still in place, and no major magnetic forces have been detected. But, it's early days. Those particles haven't reached top speed yet - at the moment they are just bumping gently into each other. High-speed smashing won't begin until next year - and that's when we may start to get answers to all those questions.

Author: Imogen Foulkes
Editor: Sabina Casagrande

INTERESTING WEBSITES

LISTENING:

http://www.elllo.org/

CATALONIA

PIECE OF NEWS: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5747609,00.html

Catalan parliament approves law for language quotas in film

The government says too few films are translated to Catalan

Catalonia's government has been challenging the Spanish national government in Madrid in different ways since the country's return to democracy in the 1970s. Now it is expanding its reach into the film industry.

The parliament of Catalonia approved a new law on Wednesday that will require 50 percent of all films in the autonomous region to have dubbing or subtitles in the Catalan language.

The final vote was 117 in favor and 17 against, with a coalition of left- and right-wing Catalan nationalists supporting the law.

The government's minister for culture and media, Joan Manuel Tresserras, called the bill "one of the most important laws of this legislature." He said it would be reinforcement for the film industry in Catalonia, and that it would give people a better selection and guarantee linguistic diversity.

"Eighty percent of the films in the largest film festivals in Europe were never shown on the screen in Catalonia, because there's a market of distribution that's preoccupied with the big North American productions," Catalan parliament spokesman Daniel Hernandez told Deutsche Welle. "What this law hopes to accomplish is to give Catalans access to a larger number of films."

Hernandez says distributors are too busy with Hollywood to respect the Catalan language

Opposition in the industry

The "Law of the Cinema of Catalonia" gives the film industry five to seven years to comply, although the government says the effects should begin as soon as next year. Exceptions are made only for films already in Spanish or Catalan, or small-market films with less than 16 copies in existence.

Opposition to the new film law mainly came from film distributors and theater owners - hundreds of whom closed their cinemas for a day in January to protest against the bill. Camillo Tarrazon, president of the Catalan Association of Cinemas, argued that the law would be "apocalypse now" for many Catalan cinema owners.

"This is a law which will close theatres, which will lead to a reduction in the number of copies of films and a drop in the number of spectators," he said.

Film production companies have also expressed concern, fearing similar laws in other small-market language communities like the Basque region in Spain or Corsica in France.

Cultural preservation

Catalonia is one of a number of regions in Spain with a great deal of autonomy. During the three decades of dictatorship under Francisco Franco, the Catalan language was banned from schools and the media.

Now the autonomous government holds onto the language as symbol of the region's cultural survival. But Catalonia's economic prosperity has attracted a large number of immigrants, which many Catalan nationalists see as threatening. The government's response has been to increasingly legislate for the protection of the Catalan language and culture.

Catalonia enjoys a large degree of autonomy from the national government in Madrid

But Hernandez argued that the law was more about giving moviegoers greater choice.

"What this law does is guarantee the right of our citizens to choose between Spanish and Catalan, the two official languages (of Catalonia)," he said. "It gives the same respect to the Catalan language that everyone gives to Spanish, German, Danish, Portuguese, or any other language that exists in Europe."

The law comes at a critical time, not just because of Spain's massive unemployment and floundering economy. On Monday, the Spanish Constitutional Court ruled on a four-year-old charter that expanded Catalonia's autonomy.

While it accepted most of the charter, it also said Catalonia cannot be defined as a "nation," and the Catalan language cannot be legally preferable. Catalan political parties, unions and social organizations plan a demonstration on July 10 in Barcelona.

Author: Andrew Bowen
Editor: Chuck Penfold